So I carved off a short section of my thesis and tidied it up into a little paper on Roger White’s coin puzzle for imprecise credences. If you like that sort of thing, you can find the paper over here (PDF). Comments welcome! By email, or by twitter if you’re hip and modern. And your comment is less than 140 characters.

I’m not going to summarise the paper here because it’s only 6 pages long, and you might as well just read it!

I’ve been thinking about rationality requirements for sequences of choices. It seems there’s a sense in which some synchronic (static) norms are justified by related diachronic (dynamic) norms. I recently hit an interesting snag in this picture.

Flicking through the “my clippings” thing on my kindle for my Chandler quotes post, I realised that I have many gems from Russell’s History of Western Philosophy also saved on there. Again, this reflects more on what I find amusing than on what Russell wrote or thought. While we’re on the subject of Russell, Jorge Luis Borges, in an article about Zeno’s paradox describes Russell as “inhumanly lucid”.

I recently read some Raymond Chandler books on kindle. The Big Sleep, Farewell My Lovely and The Long Goodbye, if you’re interested. Here are some bits of those books I felt compelled to highlight as I was reading. This probably tells you more about me than it does about Chandler.

Here’s a thing I noticed recently during an interesting reading group discussion here at MCMP. Disagreement is intensional. We can disagree about whether Superman is in the room, even if we agree that Clark Kent is in the room. I’m not sure whether this has been noticed, or whether it has any interesting consequences, but it seemed an interesting fact.

There seems to be a tension between some putative norms of epistemology. On the one hand, you are required to believe things you have evidence for. On the other hand, you are normatively compelled to believe all the logical truths. But you have no evidence for most logical truths. What to make of this puzzle?

Here’s a post that’s actually about philosophy. The basic idea is that there seem to be lots of different kinds of “measures on events” that we can think about. There are credences, there are chance functions, and there are others (about which more later). I just want to try and identify and distinguish some of these.

This is a very short post just to say that IFTTT is a great little service. I use it to watch the RSS feed for this blog and tweet when I write a new post. I’m sure it could be used for all kinds of other fun stuff.

Inspired by a recent xkcd comic, people have started to try to explain complex stuff using only the 1000 most common words. There’s a hashtag and everything. There’s a special text editor that keeps you on track. Taking time out from the dreaded thesis corrections, I’m going to try to describe my thesis in this restricted way.

As I mentioned in my last post, I have a post doc position in Munich. I have now moved to Munich and am gainfully employed as a philosopher. Here I have collected a couple of first impressions of Munich.